Good Grief: The Psychopathology of the Stoic Attitude About Mourning

Pyrrhonists and Buddhists contra the Stoics

The Stoics classify grief as an undesirable passion, and as such, the emotion of grief is something that practitioners of Stoicism aim to extirpate in themselves as part of an effort to achieve a state of apathia - being without the passions.

The Stoics’ attitude against indulging in grief is severe. Here are some statements from Epictetus about grief.

If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies…. What difference is it to you who the giver assigns to take it back? While he gives it to you to possess, take care of it; but don't view it as your own, just as travelers view a hotel. (Enchiridion 11)

…it is better to die with hunger, exempt from grief and fear, than to live in affluence with perturbation. (Enchiridion 12)

The will of nature may be learned from those things in which we don't distinguish from each other. For example, when our neighbor's boy breaks a cup, or the like, we are presently ready to say, "These things will happen." Be assured, then, that when your own cup likewise is broken, you ought to be affected just as when another's cup was broken. Apply this in like manner to greater things. Is the child or wife of another dead? There is no one who would not say, "This is a human accident." but if anyone's own child happens to die, it is presently, "Alas I how wretched am I!" But it should be remembered how we are affected in hearing the same thing concerning others. (Enchiridion 26)

When you see anyone weeping in grief because his son has gone abroad, or is dead, or because he has suffered in his affairs, be careful that the appearance may not misdirect you. Instead, distinguish within your own mind, and be prepared to say, "It's not the accident that distresses this person, because it doesn't distress another person; it is the judgment which he makes about it." As far as words go, however, don't reduce yourself to his level, and certainly do not moan with him. Do not moan inwardly either. (Enchiridion 16)

Epictetus’ logic here is clear. Because grief is a psychological perturbation, grief is therefore bad. Since grief is bad, one needs to develop a worldview that eliminates the possibility of grief. The way to do this is to remove all meaning and significance associated with any loss. A Stoic is to consider the death of their child or spouse to be no different from the death of a person they’ve never met.

For many people, myself included, the worldview Epictetus encourages one to cultivate is the worldview of a psychopath. Only a psychopath would consider the loss of an important relationship to be nothing to them.

The death of one’s own child or spouse has meaning and significance. Epictetus is saying that that meaning and significance is to be denied. While it may be possible to do so - or it may not; Epictetus has a tremendously optimistic attitude that we can will ourselves to have any opinion that we set our minds upon - is it reasonable to take on this belief? Was all of the time you spent with that significant other, the joys and sorrows you shared, the things you did for each other, were those things no different from what you shared with someone who was at the same hotel as you were?

This seems unreasonable. It seems to be a denial of the facts in order to fit a dogma about some idealized mental state.

As I have recently lost a person important to me, I’ve been doing quite a bit of grieving lately, and from that, thinking a lot about the role of grief in life. Unlike the Stoics, I think grief plays an important role. It is not an emotion to be eradicated.

An interesting bit of synchronicity about my recent loss is that at almost the same time I learned about my loss, someone posted a comment on my article, Cicero Exposes the Fallacy of Virtue, quoting the beginning of letter 99 from Seneca to Lucilius, in which Seneca disparages engaging in grief. Here’s what Senaca says:

I enclose a copy of the letter which I wrote to Marullus at the time when he had lost his little son and was reported to be rather womanish in his grief - a letter in which I have not observed the usual form of condolence: for I did not believe that he should be handled gently, since in my opinion he deserved criticism rather than consolation….

“Is it solace that you look for? Let me give you a scolding instead! You are like a woman in the way you take your son’s death; what would you do if you had lost an intimate friend? A son, a little child of unknown promise, is dead; a fragment of time has been lost. We hunt out excuses for grief; we would even utter unfair complaints about Fortune, as if Fortune would never give us just reason for complaining!

"There are countless cases of men who have without tears buried sons in the prime of manhood—men who have returned from the funeral pyre to the Senate chamber, or to any other official duties, and have straightway busied themselves with something else. And rightly; for in the first place it is idle to grieve if you get no help from grief. In the second place, it is unfair to complain about what has happened to one man but is in store for all. Again, it is foolish to lament one’s loss, when there is such a slight interval between the lost and the loser. Hence we should be more resigned in spirit, because we follow closely those whom we have lost.

And what is more irrational than to bewail your predecessor, when you yourself must travel on the same journey? Does a man bewail an event which he knew would take place? …Whoever complains about the death of anyone, is complaining that he was a man.

Like Epictetus, Seneca makes it clear that one should not grieve. Grieving is bad.

We Pyrrhonists, I think, have a healthier attitude about grief. In contrast to the Stoic’s firm belief that grieving is bad, we Pyrrhonists observe that nothing is good or bad by nature. Good and bad are judgments that come from minds, and these judgments are influenced by the minds of others.

How we judge good and bad is also about the perspective we take. For example, when I consider that the loved one I just lost was in terrible condition, having lost most of his vision and hearing, was barely able to walk, was frequently in pain, and was suffering from seizures, death, from this perspective, looks like relief for him. And it pained me and others to see him suffer so. It also looks like relief for his 90-year-old wife who struggled to care for him because the physical challenges of doing so were so great.

How can one ever be certain that grief is a bad thing? Consider the case of Cicero. Nearly all of Cicero’s philosophical works were created as a way of consoling himself for the loss of his daughter. The entirety of subsequent Western philosophical thought rests, to a sizable degree, on these works, which even today remain widely read. Cicero’s grief was to great benefit to mankind. My grief today has similarly encouraged me to write this article.

The Stoics say that grief is by nature bad, but the fact that we can see right here the good things that come from grief, grief cannot be by nature bad. The Stoics are wrong.

What we call “grief” seems to me to be a complex emotion that varies by person and situation. Grief for the loss of a child can be about a loss of potential. Grief about the loss of an elderly person can be about gratitude for kindness that can never be repaid. Grief is not a uniform thing.

It is, of course, possible for grief to be excessive. My wife, a physician, occasionally has patients whose grieving has prevented them from engaging in the normal course of life for far beyond just a few days. The Pyrrhonist view on this kind of excessive grieving is that it comes from having a certain belief that the loss was by nature bad. The Pyrrhonist remedy here is to disabuse the griever of that belief by considering all of the ways the loss was good and recognizing that, in whatever case, the loss was inevitable. With this kind of understanding, feelings of grief are moderated.

How to deal with grief seems to have been a more important topic for the ancients than it is for us now. Plutarch, in a letter to his wife consoling her over the loss of their daughter, mentions that many people made showy, competitive displays of mourning. This would appear to be a cultural difference with our present culture.

I suspect, however, that the conditions of antiquity made grief more prominent and more painful than what we now experience.

Death was much more common in antiquity. These days, most deaths are among the elderly. In antiquity, few people lived long enough to become elderly. Death among children and the young was common.

The ancients lived in poverty. Even the wealthy of antiquity would seem shockingly poor to us because of how little that wealth could buy. In conditions of poverty, the value of interpersonal relationships is great relative to the small value of weath. This can be easily seen these days comparing affluent and poor households. The affluent hire people to help them if needed. The poor rely on extensive interpersonal networks to find and provide help to those in need. Poor people with good relationships commonly enjoy greater happiness than the wealthy with few and poor relationships. (To learn more about the importance of quality relationships for happiness, see the work of Robert Waldinger, Roshi, whose Zen group I attended for many years.)

The ancients lived in conditions of boredom almost unimaginable to us today. These days, one has to try hard to replicate those conditions, say by going on an overnight hiking trip, leaving one’s cell phone behind. Today we are awash in devices to entertain us. In antiquity, pretty much all people had was each other for entertainment.

I’m old enough to have some living memory of what that might have been like. When I was growing up my family made many overnight trips to my grandparents’ home, where there was no television. I’m not so old that I’m talking about the era before television, but my grandparents lived nestled between steep mountains that prevented broadcast television signals from reaching their home. Evenings were spent in the living room, with conversation as the only entertainment.

Well, sort of. The conversation of the adults bored me. I would bring a book and read. My mother criticized me many times for doing so because she thought it was rude. But what a modern luxury it is to have books. It’s only been a few decades that books have been plentiful and inexpensive. As recently as the 1800s they were luxury items. In antiquity, when every book was written out by hand, they were extreme luxury items.

The more you interact with a loved one, the greater the loss you’re likely to feel when you lose that loved one.

No wonder, then, that the ancients were more subject to grief than we are today, and therefore more subject to excessive grieving than we are.

The traditional Buddhist view on grief can be found in the story of Kisagotami and the mustard seed. It is similar to the Pyrrhonist view, in that it emphasizes taking a realistic view of one’s loss and not falling into false beliefs.

Kisagotami loved her son deeply and was very happy - until her son died suddenly. Kisagotami was devastated, driven mad with grief. She refused to believe her son was dead. She carried his body around with her, knocking on people’s doors and begging them for medicine to cure him. One day, someone told her to go visit the Buddha, the best of physicians.

When Kisagotami asked the Buddha for medicine to heal her son, he said he could do so. All she had to do was get a few mustard seeds - a staple in local households. The catch was that the mustard seeds had to come from a household in which no one had died.

Kisagotami, excited at the prospect of bringing her dead son back to life, started knocking on doors. At house after house, people were happy to give her mustard seeds, but when she asked about death, they always told her stories about various family members they had lost.

Gradually, Kisagotami came to her senses, realized that she was clinging to false hopes, and buried her son.

One of the key tasks of any philosophy of life is to address the kinds of emotional pain that arise in life. Grief is among these. While the Stoic approach perhaps “works,” it seems to come at a dreadful cost, a deadening inside. It may even be unrealistic to expect any feeling human to be able to do. Surely, the loved one meant something. Why else would one be grieving? Yet, the Stoics say that this meaning must be denied.

Is it not better to feel our feelings, without letting them run away with us, than to deny and denigrate those feelings?